


the river is a mother

by toujours_nigel



Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: 5 Things, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-05 21:39:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16375463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: This is why they refused to let her in, Ganga thinks with the first twinges of a bewildering guilt. The boy isn’t grown, his father is clearly useless, and she’d promised to see all the Vasus through mortal life.





	the river is a mother

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avani/gifts).



> Written to a prompt of "Ganga as either stuck in mortal form or only surviving matriarch of this severely screwed-up clan".

If she survives this with her sanity intact she’s never again ever helping a fellow godling, especially not those cattle-stealing Brahmin-baiting rapscallions the Vasus.

“I don’t mean you,” she informs the boy sitting beside her, only faintly bewildered by her abrupt return. “You’re fine. Are you older?” He looks longer, and while mortal children grow with astounding rapidity, surely it cannot be so fast.

“It’s been two years,” he says. “I hadn’t thought to see you again, Mother.”

“I had thought to see you after your life was done,” she replies. “And then I had thought to see you still on your way to your father’s palace, but in the divine realms time trickles molasses-slow.”

“I am glad to have you here,” Devavrata says, and looks so young and woebegone and unlike his heartless pack of brothers that she has to wrap him in an embrace.

“Why are you here if your father is alive and two years have sped past among the mortals?”

“I come to the riverbank for advice,” he tells her. “Or when I am lonely. This is where I saw you last, and something of your voice lingers.”

This is why they refused to let her in, Ganga thinks with the first twinges of a bewildering guilt. The boy isn’t grown, his father is clearly useless, and she’d promised to see all the Vasus through mortal life.

“Then my palace must be built on this very spot,” she tells him, and squeezes him closer when he ducks to hide his smile against her shoulder.

* * *

“I don’t understand the problem,” she says to Satyavati. “I can bring a god down to their beds if I try, and a Yaksha or Gandharva or Naga much easier.”

“It must be a relative, or an ascetic,” Devavrata tells them, ponderous now he thinks himself full-grown, a man of some forty years. Old enough to interrupt his mother. “If their husband was still alive he might have consecrated the children with his presence even if they were not of his getting, but in his absence we dare not err.”

“And Devavrata refuses,” Satyavati tells her, as petulant as when she was a girl playing by the banks of the river. “I thought you could persuade him to loosen his vows.”

It is a vow that sits lightly on her son, in whose nature nothing inclines to a woman, but that very nature bars him from this task. It seems to her of a piece with mortal folly, to refuse the girls their choice, but she only meddles where asked. “Even the gods know the strength of my son’s vows,” she says instead. “But there are ascetics enough along my shores. In Kashi there is the Sage Parasara, and his young son.”

“Bring Vyasa,” Satyavati says firmly, and turns to Devavrata to add, “he is my son. King Santanu’s were not the first eyes to find me pleasing.”

The boy is handsome enough, with the rigours of asceticism washed clean with water from her river, that she only gives him a little touch of divine glamour before she sends him on his way. Vichitravirya had been lovely as a young god.

“Ambika’s eyes were dazzled,” Satyavati tells her later, “and Ambalika could scarcely bear to look at him. Still, there are princes now in Hastinapura.”

* * *

“You weren’t so eager to meet Dhritarashtra’s wife,” Devavrata chides her when her entourage stops at the gates of Hastinapura and she alights into his arms.

He’s sixty-three now, and in any justice ought have found his way into the forest, but his father’s blessing shackles him to the throne. She might have stopped it, had she known, had he been anything but impatient. He might have thought of her freedom if not his own, and not only of duty.

“I have other duties on full moon,” she tells him, laughing, because she cannot say to a mortal how strange it is to speak to one not raised near her or her sisters but the clear blue Suvastu, nor how little she likes it. “I’ve brought a gift for this bride that cannot wait.”

Pritha is beautiful and sad like earth left too long fallow, vines of sadness curling about her like the tendrils of her hair. Left untouched another year, three, five, she’ll harden and be a blessing only to sculptors.

“Princess,” she says when the girl stoops in obeisance, and gathers her up. “We have met before. Three years ago you left a son in my care. Will you have him back now?”

It occurs to her while she waits for an answer that mortals do not want every child they get, that this might be a difficult question at a difficult time. Even Santanu had thought weddings very important.

But Pritha answers, immediately becoming Ganga’s favourite among the mortals to whom she is tied, and Pandu takes and grips tight the hand she reaches out to him. 

“I did not choose to bear a child,” she says. “I was young and afraid, but I did not wish to abandon him. I could not have acknowledged him then, and I do not know whether my husband will allow it now.”

“A god’s hand is on him,” Ganga says, and oh her hand is going to be on a god the moment she can cut loose of this mortal bondage, and Maheswara’s with her. “Pandu, will you claim him?”

“Any child my wife bore I will offer whatever care she wishes me to.”

* * *

Draupadi’s garment turns from silk woven smooth as water to a living wave that sweeps Dushasana away and slams him against a wall and keeps him there. It turns to Ganga’s hand on his throat and flows seamlessly into her body.

“I do not meddle often in mortal affairs,” she says to the assembly. Her son, the sons of her step-sons, their sons reaching for their cousins’ lands, wealth, wife. “Only when asked. Does anyone ask?”

“I ask,” Draupadi says. “I will have justice done, for the insults offered me in this hall.”

“You will,” Ganga promises. “What grievances are yours?”

“My husband gambled me away, his cousin dragged me by my hair, this grave assembly witnessed my humiliation and remained silent.” She does not look humiliated. She looks like a lioness prowling, like Chandika in righteous rage.

Duryodhana, rising from his seat, looks like a tiger determined to keep his kill. “We forced nobody, we tricked nobody. It is not custom in Hastinapura to bear insolence from slaves, and Yudhishtira gambled willingly. Vasusena witnessed it; you raised him, Great-great-grandmother, before his mother claimed him. Trust his telling if you will not trust ours.”

“Yudhishtira was willing,” Vasusena says from his seat among the councillors, Devavrata’s hand still on his shoulder. “And my younger brothers willing to be staked upon their brother’s chances. The same cannot be said of Panchali, and in her land a woman has right over her own body as any man does over his.”

“All mortals have the right to live according to their own customs,” Ganga says, and if she smiles like a shark, many sharks smile every day in her waters. Who shall gainsay her? If Pandu’s sons are willing slaves so let them remain. Draupadi I shall take with me, that she may remain free as she chooses.”

She isn’t certain she will meet Pritha and Vasusena at the palace gates, because even long decades among the mortals have not entirely accustomed her to their notions of honour, but nor is she surprised to see them there with a fast chariot and a string of horses.

“Yudhishtira gave them Indraprastha,” Vasusena tells Draupadi. “Mother wants to go to Dwaraka. I’ve sent a rider ahead to tell Vrishali. She will have your sons ready and mine.”

“I must send word to Panchal,” Draupadi tells him, and other tedious mortal things Ganga finds herself uninterested in. A new island is forming in her brother Brahmaputra, and she had been visiting him there when she heard the cry for help. It is far, even as gods go, and she is weary.

* * *

“Mother,” Devavrata whispers. “Mother, you came.”

“You called,” she replies, on her knees beside him and holding back tears. He is old, now, old and wounded, his body pierced with arrows and still alive, still alive. She will devise such tortures for Santanu when next she sees him, her son is in pain and still living.

“I called. I longed to see you. I wish I could go again to the riverbank and be your child.”

“You  _are_  my child,” she promises him, and wipes away the blood from his mouth. “You ought have called sooner, you ought have let me help you.”

“This is enough,” Bhishma says. “Mother, I have done my duty by this family, my work in this world is done. Will you fulfill the promise you once made my brothers, and set us both free?”

It is as easy in the end to kill him as though he was an infant.

**Author's Note:**

> Photoset and further details at https://walburgablack.tumblr.com/post/179311500374/the-song-shuffle-meme-gave-me-beeten-na-beeten-na


End file.
